Tuesday 21 August 2007

The Mongolian Death Worm

The Mongolian Death Worm lives in Mongolia, obviously, and is so named because it spits lethal concoctions of poison and/or electricity on whatever it pleases. The creature's never been officially documented, but locals have seen it - lots of locals. It's even 'real' enough that the 1922 Prime Minister of Mongolia asked a man to bring one in.Did the man succeed?No, the man didn't succeed. But that doesn't keep others from trying to catch/document one of the worms. A Mongolian website has this to say about the super-slug: "The Alghoi Khorkhoi (literally intestinal worm) is a mythical animal known by Mongolians since long time but not indexed by science for the reason that no specimen could yet be captured or studied. It is described like a big worm of approximately 80 cm length living in very remote sand areas of Gobi desert and leaving to the free air only very seldom, in summer.

He is considered as a "terrible" animal able to kill in an unexplained way any man who touch it (poison, static electricity?)"The first report on this animal came from the famous paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews which was asked to capture it by the Prime Minister of Mongolia in 1922. The local belief of the existence of Alghoi Khorkhoi is very widespread and could accredit the assumption that an unknown animal, worm or reptile could still remain unknown by science from its great discretion and its desertic and hostile unhabitat." According to locals, the Death Worm chiefly burrows through the sand, but comes to the surface after it rains, or when a particular flower (the Goyo plant) is in bloom. One of the locals has had enough experience with the worm to make a wooden carving of it. It looks to be a much smaller version of the ones Kevin Bacon and the dad from Family Ties had to fight in the movie Tremors.

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